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Filed under: Audio, Internet

Nine Inch Nails does the Radiohead thing: Free(ish) music downloads

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Trent Reznor has followed through on his promise to release the latest Nine Inch Nails album without a record label. Fans can buy the complete album online in a variety of ways or they can download 1/3rd 1/4th of the songs on the album for free. Considering the complete album packs 36 songs, that means you can pretty much get a full album's worth of music for free.

Plenty of musicians have been releasing digital music downloads for free or for a small fee for years. But over the past year we've seen several high profile acts including Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails try to establish a more direct relationship with their fans. With no middleman, the bands may very well be making more money even though they're charging less for their music.

We'd be surprised if many people to spend $75 o $300 on the deluxe or ultra-deluxe editions (which come with a DVD, Blu-Ray disc, and other goodies like an autograph). But $5 will get you all the songs in DRM-free MP3 format.

Right now the official web site excruciatingly slow. We've had our downloads time out on us a number of times. But as with any new release album, you can already find pretty much every track for free using your favorite BitTorrent tracker. We hope Nine Inch Nails deals with its server issues soon, because it kind of defeats the purpose of this experiment if people just go ahead and download the music illegally without paying anyway.

[via Techmeme]

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